Advances in computing technology have made possible the provision of computer-aided-design (CAD) software to support the design and manufacturing of articles. Modern CAD software not only includes sketching or schematic features, but also solid modeling and other advanced features.
Manufacturing of articles often involves the welding of two or more components of an article into one single piece. A variety of welding types may be employed, including but not limited to intermittent fillet welds. Accordingly, it is desirable for CAD software to support modeling of welds, in particular, intermittent fillet welds. A modeled weld is often refers to as a weld bead. In the modeling of intermittent fillet weld, it is important that the topological entities are uniquely named, and these names are persistent across re-computations of the models, due to topological changes resulting from e.g. user edits, modifying the weld bead parameters, such as the number of weld bead instances. The requirements of persistent names are that they should be unique and invariant under topology changes.
A few commercial CAD systems offer support for representing welds. Externally, the support includes highlighting and/or labeling of the edges of the components involved. However, the method in which this functionality is provided is proprietary, and not known. In particular, it is unknown how the topological entities of an intermittent fillet weld bead are named.